What Mennonite Girls Are Good for

In these eleven stories, a Mennonite minister’s daughter moves from a youthful, exuberant understanding of her family’s faith toward religious doubt. Stumbling comically at times, Ruthie navigates life with and without the rules in which she’s been raised. Always physical, often sexual, Ruthie’s search for personal truth leads her from missionary outposts in Paraguay and Brazil to Mennonite towns in northern Indiana and central Kansas, a vandalized Native American site, women’s healthcare clinics, and lingerie shops on the secular, melancholy East Coast. Ultimately, these stories consider how faith and identity intertwine, the cost of abandoning one’s cultural heritage, and the complicated longing for return.

Jennifer Sears is associate professor of English at New York City College of Technology/City University of New York. Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Witness, Guernica, Ninth Letter, Fence, North American Review, and elsewhere.